Monday, December 23, 2013

This is an archive edition of AHN that first appeared in 2010. The second half of my Milton lecture will appear next week. Best wishes to all for a happily restful holiday week and a productive 2014.

Jim is observing Christmas. Not "the holidays," not "the season," but Christmas. On balance, the United States is probably still statistically a Christian nation, but its elite is largely secular, and that which isn't is religiously diverse.

Insofar as Christmas really is a minority observance among the people whose eyes may cross this blog, I don't regard that as a problem. Notwithstanding complaints on the part of some, there is no "war" on Christmas. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, if not hostile, to Christianity in general and Roman Catholicism (which I practice) in particular. But I don't think you have to be religious or Christian to find hope and cheer in a scenario of a poor child in a remote place coming into the world and transforming it by the power of word and example. And that a few wise men would sense something afoot and seek out the child (as well as a powerful satrap who would be thwarted in the attempt to find and kill a future rival). As would become clear over time, that child was never meant to be a secular king. His work, and his legacy, would prove more durable.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

The following is the second segment of my 2013 Heyburn Lecture, delivered this month at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. The first segment is below; subsequent posts will follow.

In the faux-Chinese sense of the term, the last interesting
time in U.S. history was the Second World War.That war was interesting in any sense of the term:
fascinating, frightening, challenging, momentous. It called for the expenditure
of blood and treasure on an epic scale unprecedented in our national history.
We can talk about some of the details later. But you don’t need me to tell you
that the struggle against Japan and Germany in 1941-45 was one of the truly big
events in the history of the world and had a tremendous impact on our
subsequent national history. You know that. You’ve picked it up by osmosis in the
movies you’ve seen, the stories you’ve heard, the classes you’ve taken.

Here are some other things you also know – things you may
not have been told but instantly grasp if you haven’t: that a nation waging two
wars on either side of an ocean at the same time was a major
accomplishment.That in the
process, hundreds of thousands of Americans died in the conflict, causing
untold grief to their loved ones and depriving the survivors of their talents
and untapped potential. And that a lot of developments that happened after the war have origins in the war, whether in the realm of
technology (computers, space travel), social change (women in the workplace),
or subsequent political struggles (all those Communists).

And here’s something else you’ve always known: our side
won. Winning meant some very big and obvious things. Some of those things can
be defined in negative terms, in the sense of what didn’t happen or what was
stopped: the enslavement of the Koreans and Chinese at the hands of the
Japanese; the end of a Holocaust that had already engulfed millions and would
have engulfed millions more. Societies that had been liberal democracies before
the war, notably Great Britain, were able to resume their way of life.

Other good things that happened can be defined in more
positive terms. Our two great adversaries were reconstructed, also as liberal
democracies, an outcome that was certainly a matter of self-interest, but also
one that led to the creation of prosperous societies that allowed them to take
their place in the family of nations with a degree of prominence and influence
appropriate to the notable talents of their peoples. More generally, the
victory of the United States and its allies in the Second World War resulted in
the creation of a world order that was highly favorable to the United States,
even if that order seemed continually under threat by its enemies and the long
shadow of nuclear destruction.

I should concede: that’s a big “if.” The fear of Communism
– from the Soviet Union, followed soon thereafter by the triumph of a Communist
regime in China – loomed very large and very dark in the consciousness of
Americans in the years following the war. What loomed even larger and darker
was the legacy of the Pandora’s Box that got opened when the U.S. dropped two
atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, an event with terrifying implications that
loomed larger a mere four years later when the Soviets detonated nuclear
weapons as well. Many Americans were confused and angry that after achieving
such a decisive victory, now subject to instant apocalypse at any time. They
asked questions like “Who lost China?” as if China was ever really ours to
lose.

But in a way that could only be fully appreciated in
retrospect (though some observers did sense it at the time), the terrible
danger posed by prospect of human catastrophe – captured by the phrase
“Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) – had the effect of restraining the United
States and its rivals, diverting their tensions into a series of smaller wars
fought around the globe for a half-century. The people caught in the middle of
these struggles – in places like Korea and Guatemala, Iran and Vietnam – were
forced to live through interesting times indeed. Some of these struggles seemed
more justified for the United States than others (very few of them were truly
necessary). And some, notably Vietnam, proved quite costly in any number of
terms. But in some literal as well as figurative sense, all these conflicts
were far away to most Americans, even if they captured the public’s fitful
attention, and even if they pierced the hearts, minds and souls of some
Americans some of the time.

Because that’s one of the two most important things that
the World War II bought for the United States: distance. For most of its
history, the nation enjoyed the incalculable advantage of being oceans apart
from any people who posed a threat to its territorial security. Instead, it
continually encroached on its neighbors, especially native peoples, in every
direction. U.S. victory in the Second World War guaranteed secure territorial
boundaries – with layers of insulation reaching half a world away – and made it
possible, notwithstanding persistent anxiety, that the danger of foreign
occupation would be remote. I’m sure you’ve had any number of worries during
your high school years. But territorial conquest of your dormitory hasn’t been
one of them. And hasn’t been since Milton Academy was founded in 1798, though
there was a war scare with France that year.

The other important thing World War II bought the United
States was time. It could live for decades off the economic and political gains
it reaped from victory in the war. It was this moment, more than any other,
where the mass pursuit – and fulfillment – of what I call “the Dream of the
Coast” was realized. As I explain, the Coast is both literal (as in West Coast,
more specifically California, the epicenter of the postwar American Dream) and
figurative (“coast” as a verb, as in gliding frictionlessly from aspiration to
reality).

Again: the nation was prosperous before the Second World
War, and its international stature had been rising. But the war brought about
what one famous journalist dubbed “the American Century,” an era of prosperity
and internal stability – a Dream of the Good Life – that is the hallmark of all
great empires, whatever political shape they may happen to assume.

This, more than anything else, has been your inheritance.
It’s not just that many of the hallmarks of modern life – the interstate
highways that stitch the nation together; the World Wide Web that does
virtually the same thing; the mass availability of colleges and universities
that represent the most concrete embodiments of your aspirations – all date
from the Second World War or experienced a turning point because of it. It’s
also important to note that the basic governing institutions of your life have
been sufficiently functional that the closing of such traffic has been the
exception, not the rule. You expect the electricity to work, the stores to be
open, the holidays to be observed. Disruptions like terrorism are scary
precisely because they’re so extraordinary. That Frisbee that sails across the
quad; that dog you’re walking through the woods; that laundry in the dryer
that’s clean and warm: it’s all been bought, and maintained, with blood.

It’s not that there haven’t been memorable moments of
domestic unrest. Clearly, there have been such moments, some severe. But the
most important disruptions in the lifetimes of your older relatives, like the
Civil Rights movement – an event that also had deep roots in the Second World
War – were usually the product of rising expectations, not falling ones.
Prosperity has a way of bringing internal conflicts to the fore.

To a great extent, the gains procured by the Civil Rights
movement and other struggles that followed in its wake reflected the
persistence, ingenuity, and morality of those who sought to secure and expand
social justice.But they also
reflected a calculation on the part of people in power that they could afford
to accommodate such expansions, a calculation rooted in the dividends paid by
victory in the Second World War. This did not necessarily mean such people were
enlightened. Nor did it mean that the nation was inexorably evolving in the
direction of Progress, though the economic logic of the time suggested that
calls for redistribution of wealth could be resolved by making the proverbial
pie bigger, not cutting it differently. The margins were somehow wider, the
possibilities greater, even if there were limits, as there always are, as to
how much those in positions of entrenched privilege are been willing to concede
to those who challenge them.

Monday, December 16, 2013

The following is the first segment of my 2013 Heyburn Lecture, delivered this month at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. Subsequent posts will follow.

Okay.
So here’s my opening statement: You have not lived in interesting times.
Neither have your parents. Nor your grandparents.

Perhaps this strikes you as a strange, if not ridiculous or
pointless, assertion. You may be willing to concede that not all that much has
happened in your short, twenty-first century, lives. You had pretty much just
arrived, and barely remember, September 11, 2001, a truly terrible day in our
national history – and “terrible,” whatever else it may be, certainly qualifies
as “interesting.” Maybe you’d point to what seems to have been a fairly rapid
social change in law and attitude regarding gay marriage. Or wars in Iraq or
Afghanistan – these were big, long conflicts that have affected the lives of
lots of people.

But even if you would concede you have not come of age in interesting times, you’re less likely
to concede the point on behalf of your elders: they have had some interesting times. The creation of the Internet.
Feminism. The Civil Rights Movement. Surely these events count as interesting.
The mere fact that you, who will avow that you really don’t know all that much,
have at some point been told about such things suggests that they count for something. And even if they did not, you
could point to a relative who had a struggle or triumph that would qualify as
“interesting” in more than a narrow way, because such a personal drama –
financial setbacks, discrimination, entrepreneurial success, whatever – took
place against some larger historical backdrop.

I take the point. I don’t mean to diminish the significance
of these events at a personal level, any more than I want to diminish my own
lived experience or that of my own parents and children. It’s not that such
things don’t matter; they matter a great deal, not only on an individual level
but also as emblems of the American experience more generally. That poor
treatment your grandmother suffered as part of the larger saga of exclusion or
inequality in our national life; that business your dad started as a little
piece of the American Dream: they’re reflections of a shared national
experience. But again, the fact that such stories unfolded in the last 75 years
means that they haven’t happened in interesting times.

Maybe by now you’re zeroing in on “interesting”: what’s that supposed to mean? Maybe you’ve
heard the reputedly ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
In that understated way we westerners sometimes associate with Asians, we grasp
the irony that “interesting” is actually a euphemism for “chaotic,” or
“dangerous,” or just plain “horrible.” Ironically, there’s little evidence that
the aphorism is widely known among the Chinese; the clearest recent documentation
of the phrase that I’ve found comes from the correspondence of a British
diplomat in China in the 1930s. Reeling from decades of colonial exploitation,
ripped apart by civil war, overrun by foreign invaders: times simply don’t get
much more “interesting” than they were in China during the thirties. Even the
greatest, most stable civilizations are subject to moments of great upheaval,
and China has had several in its storied history. But this was surely among the
worst. There aren’t many people alive in China who lived through those days,
but the collective memory of such events are what make the nation’s revival a
source of shared pride.

By comparison, there haven’t been all that many
“interesting” times in American history. The earliest days of colonial history
certainly qualify in terms of danger, brutality, and uncertainty. So does the
American Revolution. And the Civil War. As do any number of serious economic
downturns before the calamity of the Great Depression in the 1930s. All through
and between these periods, there were groups of people who subjected to
systematic suffering: their times never ceased to be anything but interesting. Yet their stories, real
and rich as they are, were woven into the fabric of nation’s master narrative
only recently. They have not been deemed interesting in the more conventional
sense of the term: commanding the attention of others to the point of being
documented and recollected. History is in some sense the conversation between a
shifting cast of characters who are understood to constitute a people at any
given time. Part of which involves the discovery or recovery of that which was
perceived as lost.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

This is final installment of a series of posts about the role of regionalism in U.S. history.
-->

What might all this discussion of regionalism mean for you? That
of course depends at least a bit on who “you” are, i.e. where you’re coming
from in some literal or figurative way. (I, for my part, am the grandson of an
Italian immigrant whose extended family, much of it Irish, is almost
exclusively Mid-Atlantic by birth. But by marriage, education, and temperament,
I am decidedly a Yankee in cultural affiliation.) Insofar as these regional
themes I’m talking about have any reality, they include plenty of exceptions.
You can find Chinese food in Tulsa (maybe not good Chinese food), and hear good bluegrass music in Manhattan
(maybe not real bluegrass). Even
overwhelmingly Republican Texas has Democratic pockets – which may soon become
more than pockets as the racial complexion of the state changes. There are
plenty of reasons, and ways, the nation-state will hold. Like our motto says, e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”).

On the other hand, there’s no reason to
think the borders of the United States will remain permanent. Considered solely
as a matter of topography, there’s nothing particularly cohesive about a
stretch of continent that’s marked by large stretches of forest, plains,
desert, and mountains, and which over the course of the last few thousand years
has been the home of a wide variety of peoples who interacted with each other
was well as lived in relative isolation. And many of our state boundaries –
consider the rectangles that constitute the Dakotas, for example – are really
matters of fictive convenience. Should the pressures, internal or external,
become great enough, different pieces of the nation could break off or
recombine in ways that are hard to foresee, but not exactly random, either.

Does that thought sadden you? At times
it saddens me, though I’ll confess I find myself exasperated enough with the
kinds of things I hear or see coming out of South Carolina and find myself
thinking our lives would be a lot easier if we went our separate ways. I get
annoyed at the way Idahoans complain about the intrusiveness of the federal
government, even as they depend on it for the roads, jobs, and markets that
keep it afloat. In recent years I’ve heard secessionist noise coming out of
Texas, to which I feel inclined to say, “erring sisters, go in peace,”
especially since I regard the circumstances by which Texas entered the Union to
be highly dubious. On the other hand, I’m not sure any of the rest of the
nation was much, if any, less so as a matter of moral legitimacy.

The real point of this particular
conversation is less about making predictions or arguing for the value of one
part of the country over the other than it is asking you to consider what you
consider important about your national identity. What do you think it means to
be an American? Is it a landscape, a set of habits, or a series of ideas? Are
the things you value rooted more in one part of the continent than another? How
bad would you feel if some part of it were to break off? And lastly, and more
importantly: where – and how – do you want to live? If you’re lucky, you may
have some choice in the matter. Try and exercise it wisely.

Friday, December 6, 2013

The following is the final post in a series on freedom and equality in U.S. history. Previous posts are below.
-->

There are two answers to the thorny problem of maintaining equality of opportunity while allowing for inequality of outcomes in contemporary American life.
The first is to refurbish the doctrine of Equality of Opportunity with a new
term: meritocracy. The idea here is that your going to this school, or getting
that job, is a matter of deserving it
after a fashion – not having earned
it exactly, but indicating a degree of promise that makes conferring privilege
a safe bet. But how does one measure this notion of fitness? Supposedly with
things like grades and test scores. But they often raised as many questions as
they answered. (Does the test measure what matters? Can it be gamed? Is it ethnocentric?)
People whose job it was to serve as gatekeepers of privilege took the edge of
any obvious or suspicious sense that the game was rigged by defining merit not
simply as a matter of empirical things like test scores or grades, but having
had experiences of adversity that one can plausibly believe will season one for
success. So it was that Affirmative Action and meritocracy came of age together
in the last third of the 20th century, even though they really
represent distinct, and perhaps conflicting, bases on which to measure merit.

My point here is not to challenge the
worthiness of any particular beneficiary of this system. (A scholarship boy who
rode good grades into a decent living, I am in many ways a beneficiary of it.)
My point here is that whatever its benefits, meritocracy has served to make
inequality stronger. Stronger, I think, than it really should be. We should be
more suspicious of inequality, less lulled into a sense of complacency that it
isn’t slavery.

Again: I recognize that inequality may
not only be inevitable, but actually useful. Certainly there are advantages to
everyone in rewarding talented people whose skills, inherited and acquired,
stand to benefit all of us. And given the inevitability that privilege is
always going to be parceled out in arbitrary ways – to quote the truism, life
is unfair – we need some mechanism
for sorting people. The problem is that we tend to have more faith in this
system than we should. For one thing, talent and skill isn’t always, or even
often, enlisted to benefit all of us. For another, that mechanism can create
the impression that life is more fair than it really is. The result is that we
tend to give inequality a pass in way we don’t when it comes to slavery.

Here’s a thought experiment for you.
Let’s say we did away with the doctrine of Equality of Opportunity and accepted
the reality of inequality of condition as the more pervasive and fixed reality
that it really is. Instead of telling you that there’s nothing you can’t be,
you would be told not to follow your dreams, that dreaming is a foolish and
even counterproductive proposition, and that you belong in a fixed stratum of
society. The key to success in your life would be understanding your the
possibilities and limits of the role you have been assigned. Part of that
understanding would involve a sense of reciprocal responsibility: the people
“above” you, whatever that might mean, would have obligations to you, and you
would have obligations to those “below” you. People wouldn’t necessarily meet
those obligations, but you would at least have that standard by which to
measure them.

My guess is that this doesn’t sound that
attractive to you. But it’s not chattel slavery – the owner of the slave has no
obligation to his property – and in fact resembles some relationships in
everyday life today, like that of parent and child. It sounds a feudal in its
dynamic of lord/vassal relations, but as a matter of fact, such an order has
prevailed for most of human history in one form or another (typically as a
class system). To be sure, it has its oppressions, and the history of western
life in the last 250 years has essentially been one long rebellion against it,
a rebellion in which the United States has long been at the vanguard and which
has been substantially, though not completely, successful (again, in large
measure because we are at least partially drawn to that against which we
rebel). But it doesn’t lie – or at least lie in the same way – about what
inequality is, how it works, how and attached we are to it. It also establishes
a standard of accountability by which inequality can at least be rejected, and
re-established on a sounder basis.

I doubt this pitch of mine is convincing
you, and as an elite white man who has been a beneficiary of the status quo,
it’s unseemly for me to tell you that you shouldn’t want what I have and/or
that you’d really be happier with an order where you knew, and accepted, your
place. My real goal here is less ideological than historical: I want you to see
the social order in which you live as a socially contingent one that came about
for a series of specific reasons based on things that happened in the past.
That social order has a logic to it – there are good reasons why things are the
way they are. Not good in the sense
of virtuous; good in the sense of understandable.
Actually, there are aspects of the way things are that are not good in any moral sense, that reflect collective dishonesty,
hypocrisy, fear. Knowing that things have been different – that other societies
have not made the mistakes we have, and have not been subject to the same hypocrisies – doesn’t necessarily make
them better. Almost always, there are tradeoffs involved. Chances are you’re
going to want to stick with what you know. In all times and places, this is
what humans tend to do. As no less an authority than Thomas Jefferson explained
in the Declaration of Independence, “all experience hath shown that mankind are
more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves
by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” That’s why a little
rebellion can be a good thing. (A lot of rebellion tends to replace one form of
oppression with another.)

And that’s what I suggesting here: that
when it comes to inequality, you should be a little rebellious. You simply
don’t have the power to change all that much, and even if you did, you have a
deeply human desire for distinction, to savor the experience of inequality. But
you should try to resist it. That’s why I invite to ask yourself when you find
yourself in a formal or informal social situation: What kind of inequality is
taking place here? What realities does it reflect? Do I like what I’m seeing?
Do I need it? Is there anything I can do to make it better, whether in terms of
word, gesture, or act?

I know: this isn’t going to happen all
that often. But it doesn’t need to for youto achieve the best kind of distinction in a democratic
republic: that of a good citizen.

One last thing. I need to point out that
however great his hostility to slavery, Abraham Lincoln believed deeply in the
doctrine of Equality of Opportunity. He experienced is as a living reality, and
described it with typically vivid, simple prose the year before he became
president – prose that helped him become
president:

There
is no such thing as a man who is a hired laborer, of a necessity, always
remaining in his early condition. The general rule is otherwise. I know it is
so; and I will tell you why. When at an early age, I was myself a hired
laborer, at twelve dollars per month; and therefore I do know that there is not
always the necessity for actual labor because once there was propriety in being
so. My understanding of the hired laborer is this: A young man finds himself of
an age to be dismissed from parental control; he has for his capital nothing,
save two strong hands that God has given him, a heart willing to labor, and a
freedom to choose the mode of his work and the manner of his employer; he has
got no soil nor shop, and he avails himself of the opportunity of hiring
himself to some man who has capital to pay him a fair day’s wages for a fair
day’s work. He is benefited by availing himself of that privilege. He works
industriously, he behaves soberly, and the result of a year or two’s labor is a
surplus of capital. Now he buys land on his own hook; he settles, marries,
begets sons and daughters, and in course of time he too has enough capital to
hire some new beginner.

It’s a beautiful vision. And
it may even be true in the 21st century.I want to believe
it is. But I think if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that it’s not as
easy as Lincoln makes it sound. I believe that were he around today, Lincoln
would say that if inequality is not wrong, it’s wrong more often we’re willing
to admit. And that we should fight its spread. That, I think, is what Lincoln
would do. You agree?

Monday, December 2, 2013

The following post is part of series on freedom and equality in U.S. history. Previous posts are below.

You’re probably familiar with a very old
and tiresome debate about whether the Civil War was really fought over slavery
or holding maintaining the Union. The key to understanding Lincoln’s
achievement as a politician, military leader, and moral visionary is the way in
which he was able to convince most of the American people that the only way to
save the Union was to end slavery, because the people who were trying to rend
the Union were using their slaves to aid the cause, and that only by depriving
them of this resource (by emancipating their slaves, enlisting African
Americans in the armed forces, and putting the whole issue to rest by ending
slavery everywhere) could the nation proceed.

In the long run – certainly not right
away, when he lost political support and suffered military setbacks – Lincoln
won that argument. He won it as a matter of military policy (the Emancipation
Proclamation), as a matter of law (the Thirteenth Amendment), and as matter of
enshrining as common sense that slavery simply didn’t work anymore, urging his
fellow Americans to dedicate themselves, as he put it in his Gettysburg
Address, to a “new birth of freedom.” Within a few years of the end of the
Civil War, even the seceded Southern states accepted this proposition, however
grudgingly, as the price of their reintegration into national life.

Not that former slaveholders, or their
many non-slaveholding allies, became any less racist. Indeed, in many cases
there were more determined than ever to keep the newly freed slaves in their
place, to use a phrase much favored by such people. Denied slavery, they turned
to the next best – maybe even better – thing: inequality. The principal, but by
no means only, avenue by which it was achieved was racial segregation. At
first, given the efforts of Northern, especially abolitionist, politicians to
hold the defeated region in check, segregation was primarily a matter of social
inequality, practiced on a local level. Later, as U.S. public opinion became
fatigued by the cost, literal and figurative, of the process of Reconstruction,
segregation became increasingly political as well. By the end of the 19th
century, a Jim Crow regime with pervasive legal, economic, and personal
dimensions was cemented in place, and would remain there for a half a century.

But it wasn’t slavery. That’s what we
kept telling ourselves. Poll taxes, literacy tests, even lynchings: not
slavery. Nor were other forms of inequality: discrimination against immigrants.
Exploitative wages that approached, if not crossed the line, into wage slavery.
A refusal to let women vote. You might not like these policies, they might even
be wrong. But they’re not slavery. Not chattel slavery, anyway.

For some kinds of inequality,
particularly those where it wasn’t easy to draw clear lines of race or gender
that could be used as an obvious basis of discrimination, there was another
tool at hand to justify the status quo: the doctrine of Equality of
Opportunity. Of course, not everyone is rich, this doctrine goes. But anyone can be rich. Or go to an elite school.
Or whatever. Equality of opportunity does not necessarily mean that one can
attain these things easily, or that it won’t be easier for some people than for
others. It simply says such things are possible
– effortlessly for some, perhaps, but attainable for anyone who wants them
badly enough. So it is that the principle equality of opportunity allows the
reality of equality of outcome.

Which, again, we all want too badly to
let go of. In fact, we want it so badly that we’re willing not to peer all that
hard about just how we define opportunity or just how broad it is. Having it
remain a little fuzzy makes inequality of condition easier to maintain.

In the twentieth century, however, those
old, seemingly clear, lines of race and gender became increasingly problematic.
The doctrine of Equality of Opportunity didn’t apply if there were formal rules
in place that barred you from even playing the game. In such cases, the gap
between theoretical inclusion and the reality of exclusion became glaring, even
frightening, in terms of what it might portend if allowed to continue,
especially on the part of elites anxious to justify their unequal status to
themselves, other Americans, and foreigners. Thanks to the Civil Rights
movement, many of these formal barriers were removed. No longer could
inequality be officially justified on the basis of race – or race alone. Women and people of other races
began appearing, usually in small numbers, at exclusive sites of privilege –
schools, clubs, neighborhoods – whose appeal, whose actual essence, was
inequality. The question now was how to protect minority status when anyone –
even those other minorities – could in theory participate.

Next: The uneasy marriage of meritocracy and affirmative action as partners in the quest for equality today.

About King's Survey

King's Survey is an imaginary high school history class taught by Abraham King, a.k.a. "Mr. K." Though the posts proceed in a loosely chronological fashion, you can drop in on the conversation any time. For more background on this series, see my other site, Conversing History. The opening chapter of "Kings Survey" is directly below.

“The Greatest Catholic Poet of Our Time . . . Is a Guy from the JerseyShore? Yup,” in The Best Catholic Writing 2007, edited by Jim Manney (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2007)

“I’s a Man Now: Gender and African-American Men,” in Divided Houses:Gender and the Civil War, edited by Nina Silber and Catherine Clinton (Oxford University Press, 1992).

THE COMPLETE MARIA CHRONICLES, 2009-2010

Most writing in the vast discourse about American education is analytic and/or prescriptive: It tells. Little of that writing is actually done by active classroom teachers. The Maria Chronicles, like the Felix Chronicles that preceded them (see directly below), takes a different approach: They show. These (very) short stories of moments in the life of the fictional Maria Bradstreet, who teaches U.S. history at Hudson High School, located somewhere in metropolitan New York, dramatize the issues, ironies, and realities of a life in schools. I hope you find them entertaining. And, just maybe, useful, whether you’re a teacher or not.–Jim Cullen